Great Opening Lines

I noticed the surgeon the first time I went to that seedy cafe on the edge of the town.

-- Géza Csáth, "The Surgeon" (trans. J. Kessler and C. Rogers)
 
Two white-jacketed orderlies were prepping a short, blonde corpse. The big, marble-topped dissecting table could have taken a fellow twice his size. Just a couple of days ago this flaccid cadaver, stocky and short as a boy, was still known as Trepov. Known everywhere simply as Trepov.

The two men worked cheerfully and quickly. They sponged the flesh over again, letting the bloodied water run down the drain cut in the table top. Then they seized the corpse by its shoulders, heaved it to a sitting posture, and sponged off the fat, white back. One took a comb out and ran it through the blonde hair. But he parted it on the wrong side, not as the dead man had done when among the living.

---- Géza Csáth, "Trepov on the Dissecting Table" (trans. J. Kessler and C. Rogers)
 
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

-- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
 
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"

-William Gibson, "Neuromancer".
 
"Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months"

-J. G. Ballard., "High Rise"
 
A procession of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded.

We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You’ll read them—or they’ll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.

Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they’ll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy.

-- Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (1919)
 
A naked man in a city street--the track of a horse in volcanic mud--the mystery of reindeer's ears--a huge, black form, like a whale, in the sky, and it drips red drops as if attacked by celestial swordfishes--an appalling cherub appears in the sea--

Confusions.

Showers of frogs and blizzards of snails--gushes of periwinkles down from the sky--

The preposterous, the grotesque, the incredible--and why, if I am going to tell of hundreds of these, is the quite ordinary so regarded?

An unclothed man shocks a crowd--moments later, if nobody is generous with an overcoat, somebody is collecting handkerchiefs to knot around him.

A naked fact startles a meeting of a scientific society--and what ever it has for loins is soon diapered with conventional explanations.

Chaos and muck and filth--the indeterminable and the unrecordable and the unknowable--and all men are liars--and yet--

-- Charles Fort, Lo! (1931)
 
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Roll-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.

--Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
 
A good many years ago, when a young man, a student in Paris, I knew the great Carot, and witnessed by his side many of those cases of mind-malady, in the analysis of which he was such a master. I remember one little maid of the Marais who, until the age of nine, did not differ from her playmates; but one night, lying abed she whispered into her mother’s ear: “Mama, can you not hear the sound of the world?” It appears that her geography had just taught her that our globe reels with an enormous velocity on an orbit about the sun; and this sound of the world of hers was merely a murmur in the ear, heard in the silence of night. Within six months she was as mad as a March-hare.

-- M. P. Shiel, “The House of Sounds” (1896 / rev. 1911)
 
'Swounds! The good doctor beat me to it! I had "The House of Sounds" at mine fingertips and ready to transcribe, I did. I take your Shiel and raise you another:

Three days ago! by heaven, it seems an age. But I am shaken--my reason is debauched. A while since, I fell into a momentary coma precisely resembling an attack of petit mal. "Tombs, and worms, and epitaphs”--that is my dream. At my age, with my physique, to walk staggery, like a man stricken! But all that will pass: I must collect myself--my reason is debauched. Three days ago! it seems an age! I sat on the floor before an old cista full of letters. I lighted upon a packet of Cosmo’s. Why, I had forgotten them! they are turning sere! Truly, I can no more call myself a young man. I sat reading, listlessly, rapt back by memory. To muse is to be lost! of that evil habit I must wring the neck, or look to perish. Once more I threaded the mazy sphere-harmony of the minuet, reeled in the waltz, long pomps of candelabra, the noonday of the bacchanal, about me.

-- M. P. Shiel, "Xélucha"


PS. Lovecraft referred to this tale as "a noxiously hideous fragment".
 
At the time of the shortest, sleepy winter days, edged on both sides with the furry dusk of mornings and evenings, when the city reached out ever deeper into the labyrinth of winter nights, and was shaken reluctantly into consciousness by the short dawn, my father was already lost, sold and surrendered to the other sphere.

- Bruno Schulz: Cinnamon Shops​

or maybe
​

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, --as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? --from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.​

- Poe: Berenice​
 
The forest was ablaze.

From horizon to horizon stretched a wall of smoke and flame, staining the night sky red and blotting out the stars. Vegetation shriveled and was instantly consumed; great trees toppled shrieking toward the earth, dying gods before an angry gale, and the sound of their destruction was like the roaring of a thousand winds.

-- T. E. D. Klein, The Ceremonies (1984)
 
Came the yellow days of winter, filled with boredom. The rust-coloured earth was covered with a threadbare, meagre tablecloth of snow full of holes. There was not enough of it for some of the roofs and so they stood there, brown and black, shingle and thatch, arks containing the sooty expanses of attics--coal-black cathedrals, bristling with ribs of rafters, beams, and spars--the dark lungs of winter winds. Each new dawn revealed chimney stacks and chimney pots which had emerged during the hours of darkness, blown up by the night winds; the black pipes of a devil's organ. The chimney sweeps could not get rid of the crows which in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch, only to fly away at dawn in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt, undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent crowing the musty yellow streaks of light. The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.

-- Bruno Schulz, "Birds" (trans. Celina Wieniewska)
 
Like a ghost stalking across a battlefield, permeable to spears and answering gouts, I invaded the diaphanous clamour of bats and asps (and the deposit of evaporated shrieks and hisses which archive their casual deaths) vulnerable only to fears and the shadows of fears radiating from the horrible house on the hill's crest. The faint lights blinking from its windows were as vacant and feeble as stars, and the paraphrased spectrum of moonlight grazing this choppy landscape kept all its discoveries to itself. The shrubbery I waded through glutted darkness under noon; chuckling stones evaded my feet, scuttling and yawing into the thicker night like living things. Chaotic sarsens thrust up everywhere reminded me that of all the energies expended here, out of the cratones and the helical histories of men, only the stone house remained--- that some coherent spirit--- some frightful worm of time--- was here able to conjoin the longitude of life with the chill and pallor of death.

-- William Scott Home, "The Lamps Are Lighted in the House of Hides" (from Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons)
 
In this old apartment, spacious rooms had been sliced to cubicles where the staccato chatter of the inmates, relayed like tom-tom messages, mingled with the crash of irreconcilable radios. For the moment it was so quiet I thought to be alone in the place. The unlifting evening of back rooms in crowded areas deepened. The page I wrote became hazy; resting awhile, I looked up at my bit of ceiling. The moulding, like a monorail into the unknown, streaked through a false wall into the visibility of other lodgings.

-- Mina Loy, "The Agony of the Partition"
 
"The extraordinary is a province of the solitary soul. Lost the very moment the crowd comes into view, it remains within the great hollows of dreams, an infininitely secluded place that prepares itself for your arrival, and for mine."
-- Thomas Ligotti, "The Sect of the Idiot."
 
"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
 
MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, --as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? --from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

--Edgar Allan Poe, "Berenice"
 
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